German tabloid Bild is the latest to announce it will prevent users who have installed the advert-hiding plug-ins from viewing its articles.
It joins dozens of other sites who object to the technology’s threat to their income.
Users have flocked to the extensions to speed up page-load times and reduce the toll on their mobile devices’ battery life.
Apple’s recent move to start supporting ad-blockers on its iPhones and iPads has brought the matter to the fore.
But other tech companies are trying to convince users there is a way to live with ads, by making them less frustrating.
That one that leaves you shouting at your phone or tablet to load a web page you want to see.
Visiting a web page on a phone or tablet can be irritating and not just because the speed of mobile connections can be far below that of the average home network.
Even wi-fi is often slower in a coffee shop or on a train because so many other people are using it.
The experience is made worse by pop-up, rollover and interstitial ads, navigation bars and the like that make a page jump up, down, left and right as different bits load.
We’ve all tried to stab a link with a finger only to have the page leap down so you accidentally hit the ad that you then have to kill to get at the actual page.
Solving the problem is important because so many of us now get our favourite sites via handheld gadgets.
Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, has said that this summer was the first time it had seen more searches done via mobile than desktops.
Browsing the web on a laptop or desktop can be frustrating when an entire page is left hanging because an ad network somewhere out there in cyberspace is having a bad day.
Then there are the auto-playing video ads.
Or the ones that obscure the page you want to see and make you hunt for the “X” that’ll get you back to where you wanted to be in the first place.
And don’t forget the links lurking in pages that explode into ads when your mouse pointer just grazes them.
Or the hidden trackers that watch what you do on a page and report it to anyone who buys their data.
A study by the New York Times indicated that more than half of all the data on popular news sites came from sources unrelated to articles.
It’s no wonder that millions of people now use ad-blockers to remove these irritants. The exact numbers are disputed, but about 40% of people are believed to now use ad blockers.
Source-BBC
